


Conferences and Casserole Dishes

by hufflepirate



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Gen, Melissa is everybody's mother, Post-Series, ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-15
Updated: 2014-03-15
Packaged: 2018-01-15 20:03:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1317520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hufflepirate/pseuds/hufflepirate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s been almost a year since Deucalion, and things have finally settled down.  Scott and his friends are all seniors, and there are college applications and parent-teacher conferences and a million grocery runs to make.  Now that everything is calm for the first time in years, Melissa McCall realizes she’s somehow ended up with 4 kids instead of 1... and maybe more than 4.</p>
<p>I wrote this between 3A and 3B so some things aren't perfectly canon-y anymore, but it's still shamelessly fluffy, so... Yay fluff!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Conferences and Casserole Dishes

When Louise asked when, exactly, she had managed to acquire so many children, Melissa McCall had no idea what to say. She had four parent-teacher conferences to go to tonight, in spite of the fact that she technically only had one son, and she couldn’t quite seem to put the reasons for it into words. That was just the way it was.

For a minute, she wished she could just explain that they’d been around since Scott became an Alpha, but then she realized that even if she could explain the werewolf thing, that wouldn’t be the truth. She could always tell Stiles had been around more than usual when all of her casserole dishes were dirty, and that had been going on since before the boys were even in high school. 

She had stopped being the mom of an only child a long time ago, but it had never been official. It still wasn’t. And she didn’t quite know how to talk about it with people who couldn’t imagine raising one teenage boy, much less adding to her household until she had four or five of them.

Before she could answer Louise, her cell phone buzzed and she took the call because it got her out of answering the question. “I’ve got to take this,” she said, separating herself from the other woman, “We can talk tomorrow.” Louise looked mildly affronted, but let her go.

Melissa ducked out the door before she answered the phone, wary of being overheard in case it was something to do with the pack. “Hello, Sheriff Stilinski,” she answered, hurrying toward the parking lot. She’d been on her way out the door when Louise cornered her, and she had more than enough to do tonight.

"Hello Melissa," he began, "We’ve just found a body in a dumpster." Her stomach twisted uncomfortably. "Don’t worry though, it’s not one of the kids," the sheriff continued, "and cause of death seems to be a gunshot wound. No scratches or bite marks. I think it’s a human thing."

"Ok," she said, trying to keep her voice neutral in respect for the dead, in spite of the relief she felt at the phrase "gunshot wound." She shouldn’t feel grateful that someone had been shot, but she did. All of the alternatives she could think of would be worse. The pack had finally gotten settled, and she couldn’t stand the idea of them being shaken up again with college applications coming due so soon for so many of them. "So what do you need from me?"

There was an awkward pause and then the Sheriff answered, “Would you mind going to Stiles’s parent teacher conference? It’s going to be a long night at the station.”

Melissa laughed. “No problem. I’ll just add it to my list. What time is it?”

Four conferences had been hard enough to explain to her coworkers. Five would be harder still. But at least this one wouldn’t have to be explained to the teachers - Sheriff Stilinski had gone to Scott’s conference when the boys were freshmen, because she’d been stuck at the hospital all night. They would, she hoped, remember that.

She wasn’t sure what she was going to tell the teachers to explain why she was at Isaac, Ethan, and Aiden’s conferences, other than that they had no parents of their own to come.

Twenty minutes later, she was home again, trying to ignore the thunderous noise of Scott’s pack playing video games in the living room as she rummaged through the fridge for anything she could eat in the time before she had to leave for the school. There wasn’t much here, which meant it was time to go to the grocery store again. With so many werewolf mouths to feed, her grocery bills had quintupled, and it was still hard to keep food in the cabinets.

Just as she was pulling out the last of the tuna casserole, Stiles came in, shouting something about a rematch over his shoulder at the rest of them. “Oh man, that went fast,” he commented, peering over her shoulder into the casserole dish.

"It always does," she said, smiling in spite of herself as the boy rolled his eyes affectionately at the rest of the pack. "You know," she added, "I really should finish giving you those cooking lessons we started when you were 9."

Stiles flung his hands up, palms toward her, “Whoa now. You’re not tricking me into feeding that crowd.”

Neither of them mentioned that he already did, more often than not. Isaac was good in the kitchen, but he’d begged his way back into his old job at the graveyard once things had settled down here, and he struggled to find the time. The twins had never learned to cook, and Scott had always been useless in the kitchen, even as he and Stiles were learning.

She had taught Stiles and Scott to cook the summer they were 9 years old. Stiles had lost his mother and his father had been drinking heavily, but Melissa hadn’t had much power to fix any of that. She’d done what she could to talk to the sheriff about his drinking, but it had been largely futile. So she’d shifted her focus. She’d done what she could to help Stiles keep his head above water. She’d gone from feeding Stiles when there was no food in his house to teaching him to feed himself. And it had been enough, in a way. He and his father had made it through. And now he was helping her keep her head above water. It was funny how things came around.

"And anyway," Stiles said, jumping back in, "what’s wrong with my casseroles? They get eaten just fine."

As she scooped the rest of the casserole into a bowl and put it in the microwave, she couldn’t quite argue with that. Instead she asked, “And you never think about doing something else instead? You never get bored with it?”

Stiles snorted derisively, but didn’t answer. She let it go. He could pretend whatever he wanted to pretend about it, but they both knew Stiles got bored easily and quickly, and that if his cooking hadn’t been all that stood between him and his father and starvation on so many occasions, he would have dropped the hobby years ago.

She kept talking. “I stopped with casseroles when you boys were 9 because I didn’t want you to hurt yourself on the stovetop. The oven seemed safer, and it even made me nervous letting you two loose on it. But you’re not 9 anymore, and after everything you boys have been through, I think I can trust you not to burn yourself on the stove.”

Stiles grinned as if the vote of confidence meant something, even though she knew it doesn’t mean as much anymore as it once had. He simply didn’t need it as much as he had before everything had happened with the werewolves.

"Fine," he agreed, "But I’m still not getting stuck cooking for them all the time, just ‘cause I’m human. You know, for a bunch of killer predators, they’re pretty helpless. I think you should teach all of them."

Melissa turned to pull the hot casserole out of the microwave, “Yeah, I’ll get on that. As soon as I get back from five parent-teacher conferences.”

Stiles snorted, “Jeez. And they call me ‘Mom.’”

"Don’t worry," she answered, "They call me ‘Mom’ too."

It was true. Stiles was the only one of the boys who populated her house who hadn’t called her ‘Mom’ at least once. Isaac had said it only once, and then he’d turned bright red and refused to look at her. She suspected that the loss of his mother was still too recent for him. And that was hardly surprising. It was too soon for Stiles to be healed from the loss of Claudia, and that had been close to a decade ago, now.

The twins had been flourishing under Scott’s leadership, more than anyone had expected them to be, and they’d settled into calling her ‘Mom’ like it was the most natural thing in the world. Alphas or not, they seemed to need this chance at something that approached normalcy, and they had latched onto it like a life raft. She could never be quite sure what was going on in their heads, but she knew they needed this. Whatever “this” was.

Even Danny, here with Ethan for about half of his waking hours, had called her ‘Mom’ once by accident, after an evening of hearing everyone else do it. Lydia had slipped once, too, with a glint in her eye that made Melissa wonder if it had been a slip at all, or if she were trying to make it clear to everyone that she was part of the pack just as much as they were.

But never Stiles.

Stiles tipped his head to the side. “Wait - five conferences?”

She nodded. “Yup, yours too. Your dad’s working late.”

 

And then he said it. “Wow. You know, if they’re gonna call me ‘Mom,’ they probably ought to call you ‘Grandma.’”

She could have taken it as an insult. But she didn’t. Because there was logic there. Stiles logic, admittedly, with about 5 steps dropped out of the middle, but still logic. And logic she’d known Stiles long enough to be able to follow. The mother of your mother was your grandmother. If he was their mother and she was his mother, she was their grandmother.

It was the closest he’d ever come to calling her ‘Mom,’ and it was the closest she was likely to get. She knew how much he’d loved his own mother, and she knew how much it had hurt him to lose her.

Stiles didn’t quite meet her eyes, but he did let her hug him, one-armed and briefly, as she passed him on the way to the living room to remind the other boys that anyone with failing grades was supposed to come with her to the parent-teacher conferences. Scott wasn’t going this year, and neither was Stiles. She was proud of them both. And not just for their grades. The other boys needed her, but Scott and Stiles had become people she could count on - people she was allowed to need.

They’d grown up. And if they still had a little ways to go before they were ready to go out there on their own, she was confident that she could get them there. She’d joked that she couldn’t start the cooking lessons now, with everything else on her plate, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t start planning for them. They’d start over Christmas.


End file.
